What happened /g/? Where's the old world wide web? Where's the old internet? Where are the small but fasicanting communities? What went wrong?
Jews figured out how to milk it for profit
Your momma came
>>52127427
pretty much Google and Facebook
Yahoo closed down geocities.
How can we bring it back?
>>52127622
>>52127665
https://neocities.org/
omg the nostalgia... just look at this http://packardbell.neocities.org/
>>52127743
I'm not talking about geocities only. I'm talking about the whole internet. How can we bring it back?
>>52127665
encourage normies to use ad-blockers
ad money is behind the rise of content mills, clickbait, JS-filled websites, and omnipresent tracking
>>52127743
> Snowden-grade SSL cryptography
Now that's pandering.
>>52127911
does anyone really believe that the NSA hasn't gotten around to going over to all the CAs and saying "Hey. Give us your root certificate. Here's an NSL. You have to do it and never tell anybody or you're off to gitmo"
>>52127427
Normies happened.
>>52127427
this asshole happened.
>>52127427
females and normalfags started using the internet. Before 2007, females didn't exist on the internet. Thanks to the big bong theory, every female and normalfag out there claims to be a nerd xd.
>>52127427
anyone know the link to some guys yahoo geocities collection site?
someone posted it last week but forgot to save the link, looked so 80s
>>52127743
Mfw
Last name
>>52128102
Youtube did even more to fill the internet with normies, yknow
>>52128418
early youtube wasn't that bad.
facebook, otoh, has always been shit.
>>52127881
>JavaScript filled websites are bad
Fuck you and your bubble.
Commercialization.
Domestication.
Castration.
When I think about how the internet has changed over this past decade or so I'm almost weirdly sympathetic to people with nostalgia for the Wild West or the Confederate South and that type of thing.
What are kids taught about such periods in history?
Mainly that they're violent, lawless, perhaps a bit racist, dangerous, impoverished etc.
But there's another side to these "pre-domestication" periods as well.
I kind of think of the old internet as being like that. Why did it have to change? Well, frankly, it had all the characteristics that the 'civilizing forces' of humanity didn't like about those other periods I just mentioned... Instability, violence, inequality etc. But they forget the whole sense of adventure aspect of it, the sense of discovery.
This is kind of a brutal thing to say because it implies that human society has pretty much two options: a civilized but essentially 'dull' way of life; and an un-civilized but genuinely interesting one. Whenever there's a choice between two such options it seems the Zeitgeist sooner or later favors the former, but there's something precious lost in all of this.
itt: people who got old and stopped looking for small, strange, and tight-knit communities so assumed they must not exist
Bye fags. I'm gonna go check out some more princess leia x jabba sloppy erotic fanfiction written by communities of autists. Have fun bitching about popular websites that you make no effort to look beyond.
Fucking disgusting. Old people have no fucking energy - you people should be ground up and fed to the young so we can keep making rad blogs about guys that piss 10 - 20 meters.
fuck zuck
https://ipfs.io/
>>52127427
Subreddits
Voat.co
4chan
Slack channel
Google+ channels
Gitter chat.
Probably more of those than ever, now baww more.
>>52127881
>JS is bad
>2015
>>52127427
Here it is, op:
http://geocities90s.neocities.org/
>>52131144
And Medium
And Facebook Groups
And Quora topics
>>52131144
You have no idea what you're talking about.
>What went wrong?
By the second half of the 00's, Geocities became a laughable joke, so when it came time to pull the plug, no one really cared because to them, Geocities was a joke. It was only a while afterwards when they realized how important it was.
>>52133196
Cont.
I guess to put it really bluntly, it wasn't so much the fault of the people pulling the plug, but it was the people who just didn't care enough about the past, thinking there was nothing important about "Badly designed anime websites" who just stood there and said "I don't give a shit, less stupid Sailor Moon sites with shitty .gifs". Sadly with human nature, we never see the true importance of something until it's too late and it's truly gone, and that's more or less how sites like Geocities died. To everyone else, it was just a bunch of stuff of no value, when really, it was the complete opposite. Pages that were unique from eachother and didn't confirm to a shitty template, slight imperfections that made them all the more human, telling a human story. But sadly by the winter years, everyone looked at it and just thought it was stupid and essentially just let Yahoo and the others destroy the old internet, not once thinking about its importance, or even thinking that it was important.
The old internet pretty much got cremated in 2009 and no one cared until after it was all ashes, they just did other things and joke about it.
Here it is again!
>Where's the old internet?
Only in your memories, but here's the kicker - you only remember the good parts.
>Where are the small but fasicanting communities?
This is very careful fancy talk for "circlejerk".
>What went wrong?
You grew up and can now judge things as they actually are.
Nostalgia is so, so, oh so very, deeply, completely, amazingly, catastrophically shit.
>>52133376
I like how you explicitly mention 2009. I noticed also in this thread mention of 2007. As time goes on, you'll notice more completely random mentions of years, and as the shit sample gets big enough, it will range from 1995 - 2010.
Why does this happen? That's because there's a wide range of ages out there, all dead set sure that the internet started sucking as soon as they turned 16 - 18.
>waiting for the word "objectively" next
>>52127970
Not all are based in the US so it'll be more difficult then that.
However, I think they have may have, or be able to obtain, the root DNSSEC key. When DIME comes along, that's troubling.
Eternal September.
>>52127765
Wow, that looks exactly like how internet used to look. Imagine that even professional webpages used to be like this.
>>52134104
Not him but 2007 and 2009 aren't exactly arbitrary, there are some thoughts behind them. It's always hard to put a specific date around the end of something, look at the markers for the end of the roman empire; at the end of the day you have to pick one even if it's not perfect.
>>52134104
Taking the nostalgia glasses out of it, you can't deny that there is generally less design variation on today's internet. Most websites are built on one of three css frameworks. Most communities aren't 'messageboards' anymore but subreddits, tumblrs, facebook groups etc; i.e. not even distinctive websites but pages on some corporate entity's site. Even chans all pretty much look the same.
>>52134399
It's in that range.
The centralization of the internet was underway by no later than 2002, but until the late 2000s, that corporate influence largely didn't affect communities. The 'corporate internet' circa 2002 was pretty much search, email, hosting providers, shopping and build-a-website services. This list of the biggest websites in the world from August 2001 shows that pretty clearly:
https://blog.compete.com/2007/10/01/top-ranked-web-sites-popularity-2001/
Communities in those days were pretty much newsgroups, IRCs, individually-owned message boards, sites like newgrounds, etc.
The subtle change in the dynamic of the internet that took hold in the late 2000s is that the places where people HUNG OUT online, not just the technologies that these places were built on, became centralized corporate entities. This paved the way for a certain monoculture, more invasive types of advertising, your grandparents on Facebook, decline of small communities etc...
... You might say that a subreddit can be just as novel in its subject matter as an old messageboard would be, but I disagree. With big sites like that something of the general culture always spills over into communities that seem to diverge from its values quite a bit.
>>52127427
>>52135325
Personally I start the end with 2004-05 when WoW came out, it was too popular to not relevant. But I admit that by then I had been on the internet only for 2-3 years, I don't have a real knowledge of how it was before.
>>52128206
I was first on the internet in 1997. I thought the internet was nice in 2002.
Then.. n00bs (you) showed up!
>>52127427
BUMP
>>52135439
This is like a cheesecake shot post edition of what I find wrong with these threads.
years mentioned so far:
1997, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2009
>>52140442
>years mentioned so far:
>1997, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2009
And of those, only the last two were mentioned as the year it died. I don't see your point at all.
>>52134104
2009 was the year when Social Networking sites were growing and sites like Geocities and Hometowns got shut down. It was pretty much when most major "Create your own site" services got destroyed, and social networking was finding it's way into everything, along with becoming a staple of (almost) everyone's life. By this point, Facebook was a regular thing that anyone who was anyone had, Twitter was gaining traction, and (like I said before) Geocities was just a laughing stock.
It was a pretty sad time when a whole giant collection history got destroyed before our eyes and we just simply let it happen because many people didn't think much of it, because to them, it was just a bunch of badly designed Sailor moon sites and other pages full of .gifs. The sad irony is that some of those people are the ones crying now.
>>52128364
> windows phone
>javascript
>"web design"
>social media
>"webapps"
>"cloud"
>apps
>apps
>apps
this is what happened
>>52127427
Now that the Internet has been conquered, what frontier do we conquer next? TOR? Zeronet?
>>52137970
I was first on telnet in 1991 and thought 1994 with Netscape was pretty cool then in 1997 n00bs like you got on... it was your generation who plebed out the web.
>>52142333
Tor now has advertisements, the guys that run Grams search engine run their own advertising network, which I think its the first one on the Tor network. Also, Facebook has a onion adress and a SSL on it. Whats zeronet?
>>52141577
IRC is what people is looking for here, I know that it can be IDLE Multiplayer 2016 Edition, but sometimes it can get active, just talk or try to, maybe you´ll revive a channel
>>52142432
>Whats zeronet?
Decentralized internet powered by P2P and BitTorrent
>>52142195
Apple
Social
Jews
>>52142400
right. such millenials in denail oftheir own faggotry...
Millenials, you are cancer
irc is still here although the communities are smaller and the activity lower
>>52142432
I still use IRC, and IRC is probably going to be in use for a long while
Use an adblocker and encourage others to do so. It kills the moneymilking that runs the modern web.
>>52142708
I use ublock origin on most big websites. I remember some random asshole on IRC saying "Don't use adblock on youtube or google, they need money", and I pretty much said "What the hell are you talking about? They have shit tons of money"
The guy was a PC as fuck SA tard as well who put me on ignore and that would usually make much conversation on the channel a nightmare because I'd start a conversation with others, and then he'd butt in without hearing anything I had to say.
>>52134104
A bunch of big fucking things happened in 2007. It's not arbitrary.
>iPhone released
>Facebook opens up to the general public
>The Big Bang Theory premieres
Each of these things pushed millions of drooling retards on to the net to encroach upon what bad previously been the exclusive domain of people who had at least some clue what they were doing. It's Eternal September on Tyrannosaurus steroids.
It's still here anon : )
http://www.cameronsworld.net/
>>52142869
If anything, I would say that 2007 was the beginning of the end (retards on the internet, social networking becoming more of a thing), and 2009 was the end (Social networking integrated into almost everything, geocities, hometown and similar things shut down)
Social networking brought normies to the web in a community-context. If it weren't for them everything would be as it was. People would use the internet for ebay and netflix, they wouldn't hang around reading articles and being vocal and gender freedoms or whatever the shit it is now. And you and I could mooch around our scruffy little internet in peace.
>>52142929
Right, in 2007 the iPhone didn't even have an App Store. It was just a really expensive featurephone with iTunes integration.
>>52143043
SJWs were always on the internet, I remember looking at a usenet archive and one of the groups was literally a group of fat acceptance people.
The difference is, now the media is on their side, they will literally support any weird ass person (I mean, look at stefoknee, that fuck is doing it for fetish reasons, yet he's called a hero).
>>52143094
Makes sense, while it did come out in 2007, it wasn't until about a year or 2 later when just about anyone had one or something similar
>>52143094
Before 2007, the only thing online that was "social" was email, chatrooms, forums, and icq. Normies stuck to those and the rest of us who knew how to navigate the web, enjoyed the digital wilderness. Then social media poisoned EVERYTHING. Youtube was taken over by corporate backed bloggers and copyright controls were increased. Sites like reddit, tumblr, and twitch consolidated entertainment and made everything worse. Smartphones brought Normies online on mass and the entire web was restructured to milk them for every cent at the expense of everything else.
In a way, Facebook was the real beginning of the end, but it wasn't until 2007 with the iphone that we began to really feel it. Everyone at the time really thought facebook was just email but better. No, it was an internet destroying abomination.
They're still there but its kinda like the elves, they're hiding in plain sight
>>52127427
all that 'loli modelling' is at last out of the internet so your average/mainstream people don't lose their shit and teenagers like I was don't feel disgust (I liked to watch same age as I porn, but then I downloaded a video of a girl being fucked by a husky and was quite WTF)
Which porn sites did you visit back then? I liked cumfiesta (now RK) and bangbus.
ITT: specialfag secret club tears
>>52143932
I don't mind when things I enjoy become popular.
What bothers me is when the popularity causes the things I like to change into things I dislike, or that are actively hostile to me.
>>52143932
underage b& gtfo kiddo
>>52143350
Everybody here shares the opinion that Facebook was the biggest internet killer, followed by Apple and its dumbing down of stuff which helped to create the average normie tard who spends all the day on computers and mobile phones but doesnt even know how to do a simple edit on an image or defrag his windows
>>52144023
what exactly is this "thing" for you?
>>52144028
sick bantz mate, been here since '06
welp
>>52144880
in reality they are both over-glorified criminals, just for different reasons
>>52144947
hi NSA
>>52127427
twitter dumbed down blogging into near uselessness.
tumblr had a chance to bring it back but their shitty interface and oversimplification of their site killed it.
>>52145077
hello reddit
On the other hand, Steam is really nice and has vastly improved since its beginnings. It's not perfect, but they definitely have given more than they have taken away.
>>52127427
Everything is better when there are less people
but then corporations take an interest and it needs mass appeal and those original pioneers are cast to the side for the sake of a profit.
If you want something you must take it yourself and hold onto it.
>>52127427
Things became easier.
Easier to navigate.
Easier to understand.
I mean, I know fuck all about computers, but the fact that I know what keyboard shortcuts are, and I can ping google from the command prompt makes me a genius in the eyes of 90% of people.
My work colleagues literally outsource anything remotely technical to me. Which is sad, given that I work at a structural engineering firm, as a structural engineer.
I feel sad now, this is why I listen to vapourware and neo-80's shit. Takes me back to a simpler time.
>>52145282
>Everything is better when there are less people
Wikipedia and youtube are examples of things that got a lot better with more people.
>>52145329
Liar
Wikipedia was GOAT when it was minimal moderation
Youtube is now filled with so much corporate trash and ads that it's completely unbearable
>>52145329
hahaha keep shilling on IAN MURDOCK ASSASSINATION
shill
>>52145350
>Wikipedia was GOAT when it was minimal moderation
Old Wikipedia was GARBAGE. There were so few articles and were mostly stubs. Was better off using a real encyclopedia and/or random websites.
Old Youtube had almost nothing on it. I remember being able to watch all the good shit on youtube for the week in a few minutes and then going on to other video sites to watch more content.
>>52145350
>A body of knowledge getting worse by more peer review
Que?
>>52145329
YouTube got worse, Wikipedia got worse.
It's not that things go bad when there's more people, it's that things go bad when there's more _of the wrong kind of_ people.
Iphone (actually, smartphones in general) opened the floodgates and when they came through people found...
FACEBOOK.
^This is the reason right here. The real deathblows came with Twitter and Instagram. Now people are like fucking zombies because an old college friend of theirs went to a restaurant in Ohio and posted about it.
>>52145452
>Ohio
>>52145412
Another 16 year old kid I see ?
>Old Wikipedia was GARBAGE. There were so few articles and were mostly stubs. Was better off using a real encyclopedia and/or random websites.
>Old Youtube had almost nothing on it. I remember being able to watch all the good shit on youtube for the week in a few minutes and then going on to other video sites to watch more content.
>>52145282
>>52145329
Communities are better when there are less people. Though, the old internet's still around on smaller forums, but most are for niche communities.
>mfw looking back at all of the inappropriate stuff I did as a kid on the internet in the late 90's
I remember being absolutely fascinated by the idea of talking with people online via chat rooms. To me it was the most fun on a computer I had until European Air War was brought home. Being 12 years old and getting older woman into thinking I was some super polite 20 something year old gentleman and then telling them my mom told me to get off the internet will forever bring chuckle to me.
http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com
Related toomblr blog
http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/tagged/WestHollywood
For the really weird shit
>>52145350
I disagree with you on Wikipedia. The moderators aren't that bad unless you clearly are trolling or don't know what you're talking about when writing an article. Nowadays, the sheer size of Wikipedia makes it a pretty good avenue for basic research, and the only way they can keep it this way is by having moderation that prevents information from getting to corrupted.
I agree with you whole-heartedly about Youtube, though.
so the question is, how do we bring it back?
>>52145350
Remember when youtube had the slogan "Broadcast yourself"? It's sad how that slogan is just completely lost now, thanks fucking E-celebs.
>>52145835
Wikipedia was comedy gold that you could use to fuck with average joe. Now not so much
>>52127427
Youre going to post and im going to watch and everything will be just fine.
I remember when I was like 9 and people who joined my room on mplayer would have a gay porn video start autoplaying on their screen.
>>52145893
you have to be subtle about it when you're doing wikipedia trolling.
a little correction here and there, nobody is the wiser. i have troll edits surviving from 2010.
>>52145983
This.
Every year I devote about 2 or 3 days taking all the images from the sexual article diagrams, and making the penises a little longer and a little darker each time.
I then take the woman and make her whiter and whiter every year.
I feel in some way I'm contributing to the cuck phenomenon sweeping the west.
>>52146349
the best feeling in the world is when someone unknowingly takes your troll edits and incorporates them as part of their own rewrite.
I enjoy seeing /g/ support stallman and bleat on and on about how internet access is a human right and how you shouldn't mess with the internet ever and leave it alone yet we have these threads every 3 days saying that "normies shouldn't have internet access". As if you having been here first somehow gives you the right to dictate who should be allowed online or not. This sort of psuedo-age-segregation is essentially like an age fedora. I've seen less intense ageism from vietnam and WW2 veterans.
>>52145318
>this is why I listen to vapourware and neo-80's shit
Ffs, it's vaporwave. There is no musical genre called vaporware; the terms are related but not identical.
Good shit though.
>>52145411
Unlike scientific peer review, Wikipedia's editorial process is not actually concerned with arriving at the truth.
So long as a source can be cited, a statement is valid, unless there is enough controversy to dump certain sources in favor of others.
This wiggle room in the rules leaves Wikipedia open to manipulation by biased moderators and can cause it to be an amplifier, intentionally or not, of bias, errors, and propaganda in the mainstream media.
>>52148113
I wish songs that try to emulate the 80's had reverb in them, along with a good mix of real instruments and synth... and singer that's not a hipster faggot.
That's what made the 80's, Synth complimented regular instruments and/or had sexy reverb.
>>52127665
Ipfs, let's make the web distributed
Dreamhost closed Dreambook, their alternative to other guestbooks, just this year. I didn't know about it before they closed, and unfortunately the Dreambook for my 1998 Chrono Trigger fansite was not one of those that made it into the Wayback Machine. I hope some of yours were.
>>52145866
Use adblockers no matter WHAT. Tell your friends about adblockers too. Doesn't matter if you're using Adblock, Adblock Plus, Ublock Origin, or any of that shit. JUST USE IT.
>>52149452
the more people that use adblockers, the more publishers will use adblocker blockers.
>>52149530
We can just block the adblocker blockers anyway.
>>52128206
>before 2007 females didn't exist on the internet
>>52150957
Before 2007, the only girls on the internet were traps, trannies and FBI agents
>>52149623
Until they make an anti adblocker blocker
>>52151022
Trannies/"Traps" are even worse than normal women.
>>52152142
You're a dumbfaggot, learn some shit.
The internet transitioned to a mainstream product. It'll never go back until that changes which won't happen. It has very little to do with monetization and more to do with population plus the current structure of the internet.
Small communities do exist, though I doubt you'll find them very interesting - interesting communities attract attention and grow until they became unhealthily large.
>>52128951
The difference is that the old internet was thoroughly unlikely to hurt you, whereas both the periods you mentioned could be life-threatening. It's very unlikely that those people were looking for discovery, they were more likely trying to survive. Your entire conclusion smells like bullshit ot me.
>>52152435
Old internet was more likely to hurt your computer with viruses though.
Nowadays, you're more likely to get hurt by anti virus software nagging you
>>52145318
Are you me? I don't have the same work experience as you, but I listen to too much vaporwave and retrowave since it draws upon my nostalgia.
I literally can't use Facebook anymore, it's turned into html 5 cancer.
Another thing I'd blame is the fact that by 2007, TV pretty much exploited the internet and all the concepts it had, shows like iCarly and Zimbabwe men, even other shows suddenly had to have the obligatory internet joke per episode (instead of vague "Place that I get things", it's now "Place I chat and play games") or so or have it as a subject matter of a couple episodes one way or another.
>>52127765
Jesus that's comfy.
Why cant we have this still?
>>52153113
Not really. You're confusing your personal progression in avoiding online hazards with a shift in the overall landscape.
Most of the places where you used to be able to get a virus you still can, you're just better at avoiding that stuff now. There are still plenty of people who don't know any better though. That's why malware is still a strong industry. Hell, if anything, the malware around is a lot more sophisticated now than it was 20 years ago.
>>52157879
It's less fun now, that's for sure
DAE miss geocities and shitty sites but devoted webmasters
>>52127427
you will never relive those wonton days of late high school/college where you could chill on the YTMND frontpage first thing in the morning, skim the funny articles on Fark at lunch, play Newgrounds from the library computers, or bullshit with your friends on IRC chats instead of studying for exams
>>52134060
Pretty much this. Nostalgia is one of the biggest flaws of the human race.
>>52148439
I think you should check out Mitch Murder and Perturbator.
